HMI Primary Survey (1978)

(page numbers in brackets)

Preliminary pages (i-viii)
Contents, Foreword

Chapter 1 (1-3)
The national survey
Chapter 2 (4-19)
The schools and the teachers
Chapter 3 (20-35)
The classes: organisation and arrangements affecting children's work
Chapter 4 (36-40)
The curriculum: planning and continuity
Chapter 5 (41-75)
The content of the curriculum
Chapter 6 (76-87)
The curriculum: scope and standards of work
Chapter 7 (88-106)
Associations between characteristics of the schools and classes and aspects of the children's work
Chapter 8 (107-126)
Main findings, issues and recommendations

Appendices (127-173)
Feasibility and pilot surveys, sample design, administration, methods of analysis, attainments in reading and maths etc.

Annex A (174-205)
Survey documents
Annex B (206-219)
HMI schedules

Index (220-224)

London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office 1978
© Crown copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of HMSO and the Queen's Printer for Scotland.

Notes on the text

Background

The 1967 Plowden Report Children and their Primary Schools recommended (in chapter 30, page 426, para. 1164) that surveys of the quality of primary schools should be conducted at least once every ten years.

In response, HMI produced, between 1978 and 1985, five surveys covering the whole school age range, of which this survey was the first. The others in the series were:

1979 Aspects of secondary education in England
1982 Education 5 to 9
1983 9-13 Middle Schools
1985 Education 8 to 12 in Combined and Middle Schools

The full text of the survey is online, complete with diagrams and tables.

The formatting of the text (bold, italics, centred etc) is a reasonably accurate representation of the printed version. However, please note that the pages presented here are not exact facsimiles of the original printed version: the font (Times, Arial etc) and size of print - and therefore the number of words to a line and lines to a page - are determined by the settings you have chosen for your web browser.

Most of the tables are embedded in the text. I have made slight changes to the format of a handful of them so that they fit the web page - the information in them remains the same. A few larger tables are shown as links: clicking on one opens a new window displaying the relevant table.

The Appendices (pages 127 - 173) contain many charts and mathematical formulae which are beyond my ability to reproduce in HTML, so they are presented here as images. Annex A: Survey documents (pages 174 - 205) were printed as poor quality photocopies. They are also presented here as images.

Anything I've added by way of explanation is shown [in square brackets].